The Island Under the Earth (4 page)

What labor and unremitted resolve must have gone into the building of it, from quarrying and transporting and cutting and setting, to the final roofing of it with slates only slightly less heavy than the ashlars of the walls: this thought, in varying degrees and kinds, impressed them all. There, with its back set into the hill and its two shuttered upper windows on the nigh side, like eyes, it looked for the moment and for the world like some staunch gray beast defying any number of lesser creatures … and for the world and for the moment they all for very awe felt themselves to be among the latter.

“Come on, then,” Stag said, and the spell was broken.

The very shrubs of the vanished garden had grown into trees, and the lilacs now swayed past the rooftop. It was hot and fragrant in the tangled yard, inside — once they had gotten inside, and this was no easy thing, for the massy old key at first refused to turn the ponderous wards; Stag swore and twisted and swore again before he learned the knack: put the key in to its full length and then bear down on it and
then
turn: easy as easy it moved then — inside was dark and cool and musty, as some newly-opened cave might be.

Stag entered defiantly, the bosun followed cautiously, the two women (holding each other) proceeded fearfully; the augur, last of all, hopefully. He, as the windows were made, creaking, to open, looked about with an eager face, and his thin nostrils distended and sniffed the cold, dead air. “Look, look,” he exclaimed, “there in the fire-corner, is that not a rack for drying and curing deer-hams? Of a certainty; let us see what luck we have, for, however dry and hard the flesh may be, shave it thin or hack it with an axe if need be, add sufficient water — ”

Tightly closed as the house had been, yet the small, sly wild things of the woods had been able to slip in: of the deer’s-hams, only bones were left; rags were there, and one small jar of oil unvexed, both enough to bind Spahana’s troubled feet: but of the rest of the country stores, in jars or in sacks, in fire-corner or on rafter-beams, in chests or in whatsoever thing or place, only rot and waste and ruin met their eyes. The woman Rary summed it up without words, though at first she had muttered rapidly about cookpots and firewood: now she merely took up an old besom from a corner, beat it free of cobwebs and ages of dust, began to sweep the rubble out of doors.

The augur swallowed his disappointment, swallowed it audibly. But he did not whine. He asked if there were such a thing as a bow-string for him to set snares with; there was not. With a brief nod, and a clap to his long knife as though to make sure it was there, he left the house. They could hear him working at something nearby between intervals of departure and return. Once he came with berries and once he came with an armful of sweet grass which Rary scattered on the floor. Once she followed him with the least broken jar and returned with water from the spring. Once he brought springy twigs of evergreen which she made into beds. By this time she had gotten into the turn of things and, her work with the besom done, now took a less gloomy view of the spoiled supplies.

“Here is a good sieve,” she said, contentedly. “I make no doubt but that I can save enough grain and such to make at least one meal for tonight.” Stag growled that the “grain and such” was not fit for human teeth to touch, but she faced him stoutly. The poor, she said, had often worse provender than that to contend with, and had learned how to make do, and how to make the like of it fit for human teeth to touch. “Besides,” she added, “the berries will give it savor” — no more she said on the subject, but threw a single and significant look at the sealord’s hand, even hovering over the berry pot. He gave one final growl. And withdrew his hand.

Still, he was not pleased. “Lo will hear of this,” he said, stormily. “And soon. We can’t stay here, without food. One meal for tonight, and a poor enough diet
that
will be, however well sifted, and then what? No. We must go back. House,” he said, giving a sweeping glance which encompassed the thick walls and thick shutters; “house is well enough…. But we must go back.”

Dimlight was soon to be upon them, the signs said, and he made no move to leave, strode back and forth and up and down the solid steps; until at last he found a door leading to one tiny uppermost room under the eaves and commanding a farther view than all. Here he stayed, silent, solitary and alone, and none ventured to disturb him of a purpose.

Though, when the clamor arose below, he came down by himself soon enough … more quietly than he had gone up, and with his javelin in his hand and poised for throw.

What he found, though, was enough for the whole tenor of his muscles to change, and the striker became at once but a staff.

The creature had been and must have been there all along. Only a few feet from it the farmwife had cast her sweepings, only an arm’s-length away Castagor the augur had bent to cut his sweet grasses to strew upon the house-floor. Past the thicket even Stag had strode once or twice in his mutterings. Yet what lay there had been silent … perhaps in weakness, reviving somewhat in the day’s decline as it cooled … perhaps simply sizing up the situation and peering cautiously (perhaps fearfully) through the brambles and the branches. Had their coming been known, or at least anticipated? Had the hider made a way there out of memories dim or by no means dim that succor might be had where once it had been had, house equalling human equalling help? without reflection or remembrance that nothing human had long lived there? — there, in the old stone place where generations of Hobars had come, with the regularities of the seasons? Or was it none of these, perhaps, and perhaps nothing more than that thus far he had come, and could go no farther, and only an instinctive caution had made him lay himself down in the covert instead of falling in the broad yard?

Rary it was who had found him, heard his harsh, irregular breathing, she said later, knowing that it was not and could not have been her children, and yet somehow no more fearing than knowing what rough beast might be there behind the wild roses with their open petals, behind the delicate tracery of the fennel and the pale lace of the wild carrot: she stood on her toes and she peered. And, without word or sound more than quick catch of breath, went on her way again: an act of discipline which ended, as soon as she reached the shelter of the house, in a welter of wild, spasmodic screams, gesticulations, ululations, incoherent words, and attempts to bar the windows: but before she was half done at this task she was roughly bade desist by Stag.

It was the oldest, sickest Sixy that any of them had ever seen.

“Crawled away to die,” Stag said, surveying it without passion. Without passion at the thought of either its painful passage hither or the soon approach of death, that is; for in another moment another thought occurred to him and he became passionate enough as he dug the butt end of his javelin into the shabby, scabby flanks which heaved and labored to force air into the sunken lungs. “Damned Sixy!” he cried. “Has it come to spy for more beasts and gear?”

“Dudzn’t know,” the sixy said, in a broken and weak voice, in which, however, the characteristic sixy buzz was fully prominent. The eyes were fallen in and filmy, the mane was thin and tangled — of itself, evidence he had been long from the society of his own kind, whose eternal combing and grooming and braiding of each other’s manes and tails was a byword: one of the few niceties they used. “Wudzn’t … where beaztz and gyear … were … anyi …”

The old, bleared eyes rolled in their sunken sockets, focused or half-focused, the withered lips moved, made silly and ugly noises, then said a word, said it again, said another word and repeated that one.

“Sick.

“Sick.

“Wine.

“Wine.”

The five humans stared at the dying centaur, then at each other, moved by pity, by anger, annoyance, disgust, by amusement.

“Wine, is it?” — this from the bosun. “What next? Sweet cake and honey, perhaps? Comfits of sesame?”

And Rary, never far from her need, her obsession, the wonder only that it had been for several hours unvoiced by her, voiced it now with, “Wine?
Blood
, you mean — human blood you mean — dirty old beast,
where are my children?
”

The old beast blinked, moved its pendulous lips, blew them out in the sixy emphatic negative. “Dudzn’t know … dudzn’t zee anyi fourlimb childrenz … Sick … Wine …” The last two words coming as, almost,
zich
and
vine
.

Spahana looked down at him, lying there, and no one could tell what her thoughts were. Stag looked down on him, lying there, and anyone could have told what his thoughts were. Scorn was on his face, then bitter anger, then he hefted his javelin, then his free hand passed over his face — miraculously unscarred, and with but a trace of faint redness where it had been burned — he stepped back a pace and his lower lip protruded from the wild blackness of his beard and he seemed to calculate if or not he might safely slay the old sixy without its dread blood spurting on him —

And then all this was superceded by a genuine, if exasperated puzzlement, which burst forth into a question: “
Why
does it want wine?” That centaurs should speak caused him no astonishment, for all the world knew they could; still … he had never spoken directly to one, nor could he automatically do so, even now, face to face. And it was the augur who told him.

“Water Lord, among we who know the Uplands well it is well-known that certain things of man’s obtaining are much fancied by the sixies, such as milk and bread and salt and wine. And as for wine, while they do drink it as the rougher sort of men do drink it, that is, to get drunk — still, they have another use for it, they use it as medicine — ”

“Medicine!”

“Medicine, Water Lord. They prize it, in certain ailment, far above such herbal remedies as they are well-known to know, and — ”

Stag turned to his bosun. “Get the flask. In the uppermost room. I left it there. What, you are still standing there?” He made a move, but the bosun had gone. And was soon enough back, none meanwhile venturing, in the gathering dimlight, to express any opinion by word or look. None except the old sixy himself, who, slowly, slowly, slowly, dragged himself from the green fennel and propped himself on an elbow, and then lay still, gasping. The flask was made of two pieces of wood, hollowed and curved in the manner of drumwoods, bound together and encased in leather whose pebbled surface had once belonged to some sea-creature. It had been at the captain’s belt and so escaped the loss of all the other wine with the flight of the onagers. No one had seen him drink from it, he had offered none to anyone, perhaps he had forgotten its existence. But, clearly, aloft in the small room with the farthest view, by himself, he had remembered.

“Wine, it wants?” he asked, grimly. “I’ll give it wine.” He tugged out the stopple with his teeth, swished the flask and watched how the sixy’s face opened, how his scalp moved till the ears stood up, how the dry mouth worked. Then he poured a few drops out. They fell upon the ground with the sound of rain. The old sixy lurched on his elbow, tried to crawl, failed, thrust his enpurpled tongue far out, his eyes wide open, thrust out his free hand as though to catch the drops. Bosun laughed. Stag’s upper lip curled and the teeth beneath it showed. Then, with a suddenness which surprised them all, he seized the ancient’s tangled mane and thrust the flask into the centaur’s mouth. Wine ran down upon the beard, wine gurgled, splashed. But the scrannel throat moved. And moved. And moved. Even after Stag had pulled the flask away and held it up and held it over so that all saw that no drop remained, still the throat moved and moved and moved.

“Now, old dung,” said Stag, “if you get better, go and spread the word to, how does it go, ‘colt and crone and cob, yearlion, and stallion, maiden mare and matron mare,’ that for every stolen beast of gear I’ll slay and flay one centaur. And if you die, old dung, lie in wait by the Gate of the Centaurs’ Hell, and when you see them come through, tell who sent them there.” He made for the house, not pausing as he called without a turn of his head,
“And why!”

Spahana followed him. The others moved where they stood, but did not walk away, still staring at the old sixy. In the darkening sky of dimlight a thin white line became visible, stretching across the horizon. Then another, parallel to it. A third, crossing both. Absently, the bosun glanced. “Stars,” he murmured. The sixy sighed and the sixy stretched. He moved his haunches. He sternutated. That broke the spell. With an almost unanimous noise of disgust, the three turned and walked away. Behind them, they heard the old sixy grunting and sighing and groaning.

Rary hunched by the fire, feeding it with twigs. The old pot of dry grains, roughly pounded in the huge mortar with the pestle large enough to do for a war-mace, was long in cooking. The bosun, used to spending these hours either drinking and trulling or else mending ships’ gear, had found numbers of spoiled ropes about the house and was contentedly cutting and braiding and splicing. At one end the orange-rose sparkles of the fire lit the darkness, irregularly; at the other, a log of gleamwood stood, blue-green-white its phosphorlight. Spahana had chosen a carven stool nearer to that end, and there she sat, so still, so smooth, that she seemed a statue which some sept of priests had clothed in robes for a vigil. Between the two sorts of lights Stag sat on the floor, legs crossed upon an ancient and raddled golden fleece, his hands smoothing down again and again the empty wine-flask, and the augur leaned upon the arm of a bench which had been old in the days when Hennen Hobar had had his use of it.

Castagor was speaking and Stag was listening, now and then asking a question, and then listening again, grave and patient, to the answer. Once, his eyes straying to his woman, as they often did, he caught a glimpse in the polished blue-black lookstone on the yonder wall of himself at the augur’s feet: in the accustomed distortion he seemed shrunken small and the seer both broad and tall: and in that fleeting speck of time before both moved and the image changed again he seemed to see himself at his father’s feet: a boy, rapt. There had not been many such moments; his father had been likelier, when he found his son at his feet, to give him an order and a kick in the ribs than to play the patriarch’s part with sage sayings and grave accounts of this and that.

Stag’s father had been a ship’s captain, too; narrow of temper and broad of hand; and, besides seamanship, the main lesson his son had learned was to leave his father’s deck and hold and strike out on his own (
strike
being the optimum verb), the sooner he might be the liker him. But with never a thought, never any thought, of return. Do the cave-lions’ whelps, when they have killed their own meat and mounted their own she, think of return? Big Stag had several sayings he was fond of, and one of them his son had made his own.
Women, waves, and land, all are made to be plowed
. That all should yield to him, that he should yield to none, this to Stag was but the natural order of all things.

Strange, then, perhaps, to see him sitting now so intent as to bypass mere respect … not to exceed it, but to go by another path beyond it. And although Castagor was his senior, and despite the brief-distorted vision of the lookstone, it was not youth sitting at the feet of age. For truth, youth in the Island Beneath the Earth seldom sits so stilly at the feet of age. Perhaps childhood, but seldom youth: and why, by its own fierce lights, should it? That inertia is the tendency of a body, when cold, to stay cold; and when hot, to stay hot — that during Star-flux the thin white lines which cross and crisscross the skies of night tremble and waver and bend and then, for a long, mad moment, tremble and waver and melt and become compressed into tiny, brilliant points of light, and pulse and throb — that on such occasions wise mariners put never out of port, for how can one steer? — that murrain-eels taint the water, which, once drunk of, turns the drinker into a homophage: rogue, mad, a skulker, solitary, incapable of sustaining his brute life on any food but men’s-flesh, and that but new-dead — that Earth-flux is when that fixed dark corner of the sky which conceals the Gate of Human Hell changes form and moves — Of such bits of wisdom and of weird do old men discourse when senses fade away one by one and the present becomes a blur and there is no more future and only the past is clear. But young men and young women, to whom the future is endless, the past but brief confusion, and all senses sharp and fierce and hot for the lustful present, are minded to heed the old ones not.

Of these things to any who listen do old men speak, old men and augurs. So see now Stag, a sailor and hence of a race to whom soothsayers are but he-whores, bought for brief necessity alone, sitting and toying with his empty wine-flask and now his head bowed and now his eyes raised; but with never a word nor a look nor a breath of scorn. For Gortacas the augur was speaking of the Cap of Grace.